Descaling the Enterprise Instead of Scaling Agility

In spite of all of the nuanced discussions, debates and frequent diatribes, scaling agile is about one thing: getting large groups of teams to deliver value in an organized fashion while maintaining empathy, rapport, trust, safety, and ownership across the enterprise. During this session, we will explore the case study of the Value Steam Container, looking at organization design, challenges and success. Focusing in on topics ranging from

Organization designs used by WL Gore, The Dunbar number

Delivery Triads - Product, Delivery, Technical Excellence

Venture capital style funding

Focusing on business value

The second half of the session is a workshop focused on creating a Value Stream Container and resource based on team funding

Chris Murman - Brainwriting: The Team Hack To Generating Better Ideas

schedule 2 months ago

Sold Out!

45 mins

Workshop

Beginner

Brainstorming has long been held as the best way to get ideas from teams for decades, but what if we are wrong? Can we take the successful aspects of collaboration and create a better environment for quality concepts? Come learn about brainwriting and get more from your team today!

Description:

If you work in an office, your boss has probably forced you into a brainstorming session or two (or 12). Invented in the 1940s by an advertising executive, the purpose was to solicit a large amount of ideas in a short period of time. By putting a collective of creative people in the same room, better concepts should come. Sounds very agile.

However, science has shown several times that brainstorming is a terrible technique. It’s cumbersome due to all of the interdependent activities happening at once. When spending time generating ideas as a group, you often spend more time thinking of others ideas than your own.

Fortunately, a relatively unknown technique is starting to gain popularity called brainwriting. Incorporating it into your team events can produce more diverse ideas and provide a friendlier environment for collaboration. In this session, we will workshop them and leave the audience with all of the tools to bring the technique back to their offices.

What Makes It Compelling:

I was skeptical when I first read an article on the technique, mainly because I had always believed brainstorming produced quality ideas. As a “stickies and sharpies” type of coach, I’d seen so many teams collectively throw out ideas during planning and retrospective sessions. But in the ensuing weeks, I started seeing where the article was on point in terms of producing quality ideas.

After contrasting the ideas generated after using brainwriting for a few weeks, my mind was changed forever. Even better was the events themselves didn’t seem that different to teams.

James Gifford - 5 Metrics to Create Safety and High Performing Teams

schedule 2 months ago

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45 mins

Tutorial

Intermediate

Description:

I see that a lot of organizations use metrics in inappropriate ways to measure teams. At the heart of these metrics, nine times out of ten, are velocity and story points. These metrics lead to a lot of mistrust, fear, and bad technical practices. This talk will focus on shifting the focus to diagnostic metrics.

Before shifting focus to diagnostic metrics, we need to understand what inappropriate metrics are. When questioning teams about why their velocity was lower from one sprint to another, teams are more likely to inflate their estimates to avoid questions in the future. This is one of my scenarios. We will explore this case and my other top-ten based on the 165 teams I have interacted with. Focusing on one metric does not provide a balanced view of the team.

For balance, I promote five metrics. The combination of metrics balances each other. These five metrics are lead time, quality, happiness, agile maturity, and business value. Focusing on these five metric areas can be used as a diagnostic tool to help teams grow and support coaching. During the session, we will use my Excel-based tool and visual model to simulate this balance.

When you push shorter lead times (how fast) on a team with a lower agile maturity, the first thing to change is quality, followed by happiness and then the delivery of value. Conversely, if a team focuses on TDD, the first thing to change is quality, followed by agile maturity, reduction in lead time, and increased delivery of value.

Teaching teams to harness data in a positive way will help them to flourish.

schedule 2 months ago

Sold Out!

45 mins

Talk

Intermediate

For too many organizations, Agile is primarily seen as merely an IT delivery system. Within this archaic and limited mindset, New Product Development is so manageable with Scrum. We amble along with 30-day Sprints, a single product owner, a neat product backlog, and a collocated Scrum team. But, today’s business environment is a tsunami of global hyper competition, with companies entering and being forced off the S&P 500 every 15 years. The classic Innovator's Dilemma is now even more pressing, and quite candidly, archaic Agile is of limited use.

To be competitive now, organizations need to look at the gestalt ... the entire value-stream of activities that are required to bring solutions to market. In this session, we will show concrete examples of how major organizations have innovated along the full path from product ideation to requirements to budgeting to delivery and to operations. Each part of a typical value-stream will be explored to show how agility has impacted these traditionally silo'ed functions and how forward-thinking organizations have reached the next level of performance through tight integration and agile thinking.

Learn the essential steps to conquer the entire value-stream from the “fuzzy front end” of innovation, product discovery, lean experimentation, and modern requirements discovery, to pipeline management, to agile budgeting and incremental funding, to high-performance product-centric teams, and enabling agile engineering techniques.

The result is the architecture of an entire organizational system that is designed to rapidly and effectively discover what customers want and delivery with utmost efficiency.

Colleen Johnson - End to End Kanban for the Whole Organization

schedule 2 months ago

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45 mins

Talk

Intermediate

We often look to our engineering teams first to drive efficiency and speed to deliver but as we optimize the flow of our development processes we quickly create pressure in the organizational workflow with the activities that feed into and out of product delivery. Product definition struggles to keep pace and establish a queue of viable options to pull from. Marketing efforts begin to pile up as features release faster than we can share the news. All of this stems from optimizing only one part of the overall system. In this talk we will look at how to scale Kanban practices to the entire organization to provide the visibility, flexibility and predictability to make every part of the business truly agile.

Jess Long - Kaizen Land - Gamifying Stand Up and Overcoming Anti Patterns

schedule 2 months ago

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45 mins

Experience Report

Intermediate

Learn how the gingerbread men are taking over the daily Stand Up and forever changing the mornings of teams everywhere.

Have your Daily Stand-Ups become stale? We’ll talk through the evolution of an idea that ended up demolishing monotony, obliterating anti-patterns and spawning smiles… and to think, it all started when my daughter and I were playing Candy Land!

We’ll talk through the implementation of a game board during one team’s stand up through the infectious adoption and evolution of its existence. You’ll hear how teams tackled some of their greatest impediments and helped build a zone of psychological safety all while having fun.

By the end of this session, you’ll be prepared to bring this back to your team and create your own success stories.

Jess Long - Empowering Performance Through Servant Leadership

schedule 2 months ago

45 mins

Tutorial

Intermediate

This session is focused around leading your teammates toward success over managing them off a cliff.

Most of us who have had the pleasure of coaching a scrum team have adopted the mindset of servant leadership. But what about directors and middle management?!

Do you have teammates reporting to you who work on Scrum teams that you’re not part of?

Do you report to a manager that might as well be on another planet?

If you answered YES to either of these questions, this session is for you. We’ll talk through the shift of leading over managing and how we can use the framework of the retrospective as a tool to bridge gaps, manage performance and promote transparency. Whether you’re in a position of leadership or individual contribution, the values and mechanisms we review can be brought back to your organization.